I’ve never read Jenny Lawson’s blog, and didn’t actually put two and two together and realise that she was ‘The Bloggess’ I’d heard mention of until a couple of months back, but her books have been on my TBR for a while because they are all over Goodreads. What attracted me to them was the mental illness angle. As a sufferer of depression (now quite well managed) and anxiety (sort of well managed except when I do adventurous things like leave the house or talk to people), I appreciate memoirs which have a raw but hilarious look at what it’s like to live with these and similar conditions.

It turns out that the mental illness angle is covered a lot more in her second book, Furiously Happy, but Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is definitely a success on the raw and hilarious fronts.

Lawson had a very strange childhood. I live in a city (actually, I live in a town that so desperately wants to be a city that it’s had City Centre on the buses for years despite being denied city status, but Americans would probably call it a city because it’s too big to be anything else), but my upbringing wasn’t pure yuppy. I was home educated and we had a caravan and no particular need to stay in one place, so a good portion of it was spent in forests and on farms and random bits of scenic coastline. I have tamed wild animals. So my reaction isn’t, you know, ‘Turkeys as pets, what strange country folk!’ But even by the standards of rural life, sticking your hand up a freshly deceased squirrel and then waking your young daughters in the middle of the night for some ghastly puppetry — one of Lawson’s memories of her father — is, shall we say, not recommended parenting. I do kind of approve testing the suitability of your child’s dates by seeing how they handle the bobcat that was just tossed onto them, though.

Not all of the wild animals they lived with were alive (or recently alive and now a hand puppet), either. Her father was very into taxidermy. You would think that childhood experiences like running into the warm open corpse of a deer, and then vomiting inside said deer, might turn someone off of the whole idea of corpses in general — can’t say I’m that fond of them myself and I’ve never been inside a dead anything, a record I’m sincerely hoping I can maintain until the dead thing is me — but adult Jenny goes on to be a collector of taxidermied animals herself, an example of which graces the cover of the American edition of this book but was sadly left off of the British one. Disappointing considering that both editions of Furiously Happy have a very enthusiastic taxidermied raccoon on the cover, and they’d make a nice matching set with which to creep out people on the train.

Once the narrative shifts to her adulthood, it’s a little more sedate and also a little more disjointed, but in terms of the former that’s still not setting a very high? low? bar, since adulthood also brings the effects of her mental illness to the fore. Although it’s something she delves into more deeply in the second book, which I’m reading at the moment, to the extent that she discusses it here she is very candid. It can make her writing seem very manic and unedited but as someone who suffers from similar-ish issues, I could see where she was going with that: It is exactly what it’s like to be in the head of someone who has anxiety, when your thoughts go so fast that they are physically dizzying, and I think giving these sections a more polished tone would also have reduced their honesty.

So when she says that it’s exhausting being her, it will probably sound narcissistic to many readers, but I get it. It’s not necessarily that the thoughts or the worries or the insecurities or any of it are unique to her or to anxiety sufferers as a whole, it’s the fact that they come so fast that they drown out everything else, that they strip away all of the mind’s usual self-defences, and that there’s never any time off for good behaviour.

Her marriage was a bit of a strange topic. Not that I’m particularly interested in judging other people’s relationships from the outside, but it’s a memoir and it is a thing she wrote about, so I have to go by what’s on the page. When she first married Victor I thought that, given she also mentions a present-day husband, she must have divorced and remarried, because she wrote about the marriage in a way that sounded regretful. I was genuinely surprised to find that she is still married to the same guy. Right at the very end I think you can sort of see why they work together, but her tone when writing about the marriage is a strange contrast to the rest of her life because when it comes to things like her decidedly odd father, or her life in the country both as a child and once she moves back there as an adult, or her fears about motherhood, you can really feel the love there even when she’s writing about the parts that are scary, difficult, or frustrating. I don’t get that when she talks about Victor.

On the whole I was just laughing so much that I was constantly stopping to read parts out to my family, sometimes struggling to get the words out past the giggles. Sometimes it does read like she’s trying too hard but people with anxiety are always trying too hard, even in the conversations we only have in our heads. See, I just started to write a sentence about this book reminding me of a wittier and weirder version of the inside of my own head before I self-censor all the parts that never make it to my mouth, and then I started to wonder if liking something because it reminds you of yourself is incredibly narcissistic, and now I’ve sat here in a stupor for five minutes trying to decide how much of this review I’ll have to throw out. And also that I should clarify that I don’t mean the ‘weirder’ part as an insult, just that you know, my dad is an engineer and has never had his hand up a dead squirrel, so I don’t have the same level of childhood emotional scarification.

I will leave you with one of my favourite quotes from the book, which should help you decide if its brand of humour and stream-of-consciousness style are for you:

I’d just run into my gynecologist at Starbucks and she totally looked right past me like she didn’t even know me. And so I stood there wondering whether that’s something she does on purpose to make her clients feel less uncomfortable, or whether she just genuinely didn’t recognize me without my vagina. Either way, it’s very disconcerting when people who’ve been inside your vagina don’t acknowledge your existence. Also, I just want to clarify that I don’t mean “without my vagina” like I didn’t have it with me at the time. I just meant that I wasn’t, you know… displaying it while I was at Starbucks. That’s probably understood, but I thought I should clarify, since it’s the first chapter and you don’t know that much about me. So just to clarify, I always have my vagina with me. It’s like my American Express card. (In that I don’t leave home without it. Not that I use it to buy stuff with.)